LPC Blog

November 3, 2021

University of Alberta Library’s Changing Role in Publishing

By Brandon Locke

Editor’s note: This is a guest post in our Library Publishing Workflow Evolution series, featuring reflections from our Library Publishing Workflows partners on how journal publishing workflows at their libraries have evolved over time. You can see the full documentation on the Library Publishing Workflows page.

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By Sonya Betz, writing about her experiences at the University of Alberta Library

The University of Alberta is located in Edmonton, Alberta, and is one of Canada’s large research intensive universities. Our journal publishing program is now more than 15 years old, with the publication of the first issues of our first journal, Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, in the spring of 2006. We’ve experienced sustained growth since those early days, and we now publish 70 active titles, host the archives of 13 ceased or transferred publications, and are working with about a dozen new journals as they move toward publishing their first issues with us. Twenty-four of our active publications are run by student groups, or exclusively publish students’ work, while the rest come from a mix of scholarly associations, professional associations, faculty groups, and research communities. Although we publish titles across a range of disciplines from construction engineering to constitutional law, all of our journals must have an affiliation with either a Canadian post-secondary institution or a Canadian scholarly, learned, or professional association. All of our journals are fully open access, and none of our journals charge APCs or other publishing fees. Recently we’ve begun partnering with other libraries in Canada to provide infrastructure hosting services for their own open journal publishing programs.

From Hosting Service to Publishing Partner

During its early years, the publishing program was structured strictly as a hosting service, with the Library providing technical infrastructure through access to hosted instances of Open Journal Systems. However, as the program matured over time, and the Library developed expertise and confidence in publishing practices, we began to more fully occupy the role of publisher. In the last five years we’ve focused on documenting our procedures and policies, establishing consistent shared practices, and approaching our relationship with journals as a partnership rather than a service. This change represents a significant shift for us in how we understand our role in this work—as more journals join our program, and we establish a record of successful publishing partnerships, we’ve become increasingly comfortable taking a principled stance for ethical open access, and requiring the journals we partner with to agree to standards such as barrier-free open access, no APCs, and Creative Commons licenses. We feel much more comfortable saying “no” to journals that don’t fit the scope of our program, or who aren’t suitably prepared to publish. 

We’ve been fortunate to have increased our staffing levels over the past three years to reflect the growth of our program and the Library’s recognition of the strategic value of a home-grown open access publishing unit. Our team splits its time between journal publishing, OER, and digitization activities, and we estimate our current staffing for journal publishing to be about 1.5 FTE librarians, .5 FTE library publishing specialists, and approximately .25 FTE technical / systems staff, with occasional support from our staff external to our unit, and paid graduate student positions. We also frequently call on the expertise of staff from many other areas of the Library, especially for help with copyright and licensing, cataloguing and metadata, outreach to individual faculties and departments, and communications. Our costs are predominantly staffing, with smaller expenditures going to supporting hardware and systems, and to external services like CrossRef. We are funded entirely from our operations budget, and we do not charge back any of our costs to journals.

Visible and Invisible Work

Our current library publishing workflow certainly represents our position as a large, mature program, with staff dedicated to publishing activities. Our workflows are also a reflection of the platform we use to publish, Open Journal Systems, which manages many activities from submission through publication, and to a certain degree, provides structure for how we move through publishing processes. We found it a little challenging to capture in the workflow much of the behind-the-scenes work that we carry out across all stages of publication, often in the form of guidance and consultation, training, and troubleshooting. Although the workflow presents clear areas of responsibility for Library staff and editorial teams, in reality the Library is very much involved at every step of the process, from answering questions about updating an author agreement to providing a pep talk to a new editorial team before they click “publish” for their first issue. We hope that sharing our workflow will provide some insight into the work we do, and may encourage other institutions to think about how best to capture the visible and invisible work of their library publishing programs.

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October 27, 2021

Transforming Services and Infrastructure at Robert W. Woodruff Library

By Brandon Locke

Editor’s note: This is a guest post in our Library Publishing Workflow Evolution series, featuring reflections from our Library Publishing Workflows partners on how journal publishing workflows at their libraries have evolved over time. You can see the full documentation on the Library Publishing Workflows page.

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By Josh Hogan, writing about his experiences at Robert W. Woodruff Library at Atlanta University Center

Library publishing activities at the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library have undergone something of a transformation in the past six years, a transformation that has only picked up speed since joining the Library Publishing Workflows grant in 2019. AUC Woodruff Library currently hosts six active journals, four on Public Knowledge Project’s Open Journal Systems software (OJS) and two on our Islandora-based repository, RADAR. When I joined the team at AUC Woodruff in 2015, there were several journals being hosted in bepress’ Digital Commons platform, only two of which were actively producing any content. Those two journals still exist as the two using RADAR as their access platform.

Starting a Library Publishing Program

During that period, our workflows were largely confined to uploading final PDF copies of journal issues and ensuring that any technical issues, which rarely occurred, were addressed. Our workflow could then be really represented as follows: 1) the journal editor emails a final copy of the issue to a member of the Digital Services Department, and 2) the Metadata and Digital Resources Librarian (my title at the time) uploads the final copy into Digital Commons and makes it available for download. All editorial functions and publishing workflows were confined to the individual practices of the journal’s editorial team.

In 2016, we added the optional service of assigning DOIs for journal articles published in the system, which added an optional workflow step of registering the DOI and adding it to the journal article’s metadata. This was not widely adopted by the editors and remained more theoretical than a concrete step. We also on-boarded a new (but currently defunct) student journal in 2016-17, which added the wrinkle of splitting an issue PDF into articles and helping create metadata for individual articles. We offered that service to the other existing journals and reorganized some of the content in Digital Commons to make articles more discoverable.

Migration to a New Institutional Repository

All of this added up to a rather ad hoc approach, tailored to the requests of the editors who avoided using any of the backend submission tools available in Digital Commons, preferring to stay with their email-based workflows. Then, in 2017, we decided to start moving toward a new system for our institutional repository and digital collections. Digital Commons had been an excellent choice for IR needs, but it was not well suited for digitized and born digital archival collections. As most of you have probably experienced, we yearned for one system that could do everything well. Unfortunately, we were not able to find that unicorn.

In the end, we adopted Islandora for our institutional repository and digital collections, but we found that it was unsuitable for journal publishing beyond sticking up PDF files. Therefore, we adopted OJS as our replacement for that functionality. We did so, however, with the understanding that any journals wishing to use the platform would agree to use the backend editorial workflows and not just display finished pdfs. Any journals who wished to use their own workflows would still use our existing ad hoc system, i.e., send us the finished copy for upload to RADAR. OJS users signed an agreement to use the whole system and to publish at least one issue a year.

Adapting Workflows & Services to New Infrastructure

These changes necessitated having a workflow in place to onboard and track the status of each journal and which platform they preferred. We also had to adopt a journal hosting agreement, spelling out what was expected of journals using the OJS platform as well as what they could expect from us. We also provided at least one overview training session and assisted editors with getting their teams registered for PKP School, PKP’s online training courses.

Our support at the beginning of the process includes assistance with selecting a theme, adding banners and logos, and other initial setup tasks. Once the journal is ready to accept submissions, they take over the workflow for the remainder of the process, with us providing technical support or additional training when needed. After publication, if the journal has opted for adding DOIs, we will provide registration of each article and update the metadata to reflect the DOI.

Ultimately, our transition from Digital Commons to RADAR/OJS has enabled us to provide more services, but has necessitated two main workflows as represented in our workflow diagram published as part of the Library Publishing Workflows. And of course, we are still struggling with exceptions to our usual practices. For example, one journal, published in RADAR, has the additional step of maintaining an embargo for on-campus readers and subscribers only. We have also developed and are working to refine workflows in OJS for publishing electronic theses and dissertations, a use that diverges somewhat from the purpose of OJS. Being a partner in this project, however, has helped us to be more deliberate in constructing our library publishing support and has provided us with the opportunity to learn best practices from more experienced institutions. The lessons learned will stand us in good stead as we grow our program.

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